The Cult of Ancestors. The Power of Our Blood. Виктория Райдос
essence that is created from the thoughts and feelings of a united group of people that can influence each of those individuals in the future. It can be called a collective psyche or spirit, which is fed by people’s thoughts, emotions and feelings. There are many egregores, both global (for example, ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, ‘Life’ and ‘Death’) and on smaller scales. An individual can be a part of many various egregores. What is forbidden by one egregore might be demanded by another, so that an individual who is getting several contradictory instructions simultaneously can experience ‘bifurcation’ and inconsistency of action. One of the tasks of individuals is to correlate the wishes of different egregores and to harmonize them.
Every egregore has its own goal that it tries to achieve through the people that enter it. For this, an egregore gives an individual opportunities to achieve this: resources, abilities, luck, material and emotional rewards, protection and so on. If someone does not act for an egregore’s profit, that egregore can take these opportunities away from the individual. A person can change an egregore, but for that they must achieve a higher position in this egregore, as well as get some support – for example, from a stronger egregore.
The connection between an individual and the egregore (SPIRIT) of their family is one of the strongest, protecting an individual from other alien egregores that can be fatal for a human – they can take away strength without returning anything. But if this family connection is very weak or absent, an individual becomes defenseless to it.
If an individual does not feel part of their bloodline, most probably they will feel like an orphan for their whole life and will be trying to substitute this ‘psychological orphanhood’ for something else. Because every living creature has a need to belong, a need to have a safe space where they can be themselves.
Every spirit has its own character that differs it from all others. This is the culture of the bloodline that has been developing from one generation to another: family traditions, rules, rituals and so on. The experience and information that members of a bloodline receive by living their lives is something that connects a family and helps to keep its unity. The specific character of this spirit is contributed by every individual who has ever been part of this bloodline. Its strength depends on their work and on the age of the bloodline’s existence. The spirit of the bloodline affects every member of the family. If a specific bloodline has its own strong character, it probably means that there is a specific programme or aim for that bloodline. The members of this family know their direction and tasks to work on intuitively from the very beginning. A bloodline primarily forms protection, so it does not support any drastic changes or innovations. The spirit of a bloodline takes any individual walking into it as one detail of a mosaic that creates the whole picture.
From the beginning, a family is a collision of different egregores: egregores from the family lines of the wife’s and husband’s sides, the family egregore itself and the personal egregores of the individuals (the egregores of their professions, for example). Larger egregores, such as egregores of a country, religious tradition and humanity, also influence the family.
Even if a husband and wife are very similar to each other, belong to the same race and social system and share the same profession, hobbies and interests, they still come from different bloodlines, each of which has its own features and traditions. In some cases, they will even have to reconcile their behaviour with contradicting demands of different egregores. For example, a wife might have to make a choice – to make ‘borscht’[4] according to the traditions of her family or according to those of her husband’s, like how his mother used to make it for him. Of course, this is a very simple example, but what if a husband and his wife belong to different religious traditions and social systems? In many cases, contradictions between egregores are so big that individuals never manage to find any common ground. This can happen not only between spouses, but also among different generations. For example, a child is born into a family of robbers and decides to work in the police. Of course, he or she feels alienated from his own family and does not feel any support, just as his family considers him a traitor. His own children will feel the influence both of his upbringing and the ‘family calling’ – in other words, the temptation to walk the way that was trodden by many generations of ancestors. This also happens in cases when a child has not been told anything about it: they remember the history of their bloodline without consciously knowing about it.
Many cases are based on this, when somebody repeats an event that happened to their ancestors, not remembering or even not knowing about it.
As Anne Ancelin Schützenberger writes in her book The Ancestor Syndrome, it was President Kennedy who decided not to install his car with a roof (let alone a bullet-proof one) 22nd November 1963, ‘forgetting’ a death threat and the fact that his great-grandfather died on 22nd November 1858. He forgot about this event, but did not forget how to take a risk.
If it happens that in a family history there have been many influences that have been pulling ancestors in different directions, then a person might not feel this FAMILY SPIRIT. Instead, they hear inside their family (meaning also themself, from within their personality) only the arguments of various sides that cannot find a way to make peace. Then this compromise will not only be this person’s individual task, but also the debt to their ancestors.
For example, in the case of criminal behaviour in a bloodline, a compromise of this kind might be to not be silent and critical of the past, but aware of the character weaknesses and lack of will of an ancestor who became a criminal and the difficult circumstances of their life – thereby, in the end, showing pity and sympathy towards them.
This is why an individual needs to know what has happened in their bloodline in order to understand what affects them and why.
The strength of the family spirit is fed by the attention and memories of its living relatives. It is therefore a good idea to keep your ancestors’ photographs and to know your family tree. The strength of a bloodline increases when members of one family – even distant ones – maintain good relationships, are ready to help each other and know the history of the previous generations.
Ancestors only exist for as long as they are remembered. If you do not remember them and do not arrange memorial meals and ceremonies, this connection will gradually be lost. Then the bloodline itself will weaken.
The Path to Developing the Spirit
Here I need to make a small digression to tell you about the connection of the Cult of Ancestors and teachings on reincarnation.
I see it as follows.
There is some kind of Higher Mind, God or Absolute – I prefer to call it ‘Source’ or ‘Arche’ (‘arche’ is a term from Ancient Greek mythology that means beginning, source, main principle, primacy or root cause). It is a certain field where everything is and is not. All we know about it is that it is something fundamentally unimaginable and incomprehensible. For everything existing it is Perfection, Truth, Bliss, Law, Energy Centre, Eternal Life and so on. But, because it is something incomprehensible for us, all these characteristics are conditional. We can call it ‘Mind’, but in fact it does not have a mind in the way that we understand – that we have – because it does not have a human mind. We can call it ‘Bliss’, but it cannot be the bliss that we can experience living our lives on Earth. We can call it ‘Eternal Life’, but it is not life that also includes death. Therefore, we must understand that our ideas about the ‘Source’ of life and another world are in many ways our fantasies based on the image of ourselves. And not because we are stupid, but simply because we are absolutley unable to think about this ‘Other’. There is nothing onto which our consciousness and feelings can grasp, because consciousness and feelings do not exist there – at least, not in our understanding.
There are bundles of energy that come out of Source or Arche, which carry a particle within them. This is a spirit. Each spirit has a divine spark – that is, its message, its own and unique contribution to the overall picture of the Universe, a note that is interwoven with the global symphony. At the same time,
A sour soup common in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, but most often associated with its Ukrainian variant, made with beetroots as one of the main ingredients that give the dish its distinctive red color.